Chris Jericho vs. Kenny Omega (NJPW - 1/4/2018)

No doubt a great match and showing for both guys, but I won't be surprised if it's not even a MOTYC.

A match where I admire the effort but just goes on way too long (36 minutes!). Also had probably unrealistic hopes of them trying to replicate Rush/LA Park in a NJPW setting and it didn't happen.

I loved this match, but it wasn't even the best match on the show (MiSu vs Goto was better, IMO). Zero chance of making my all time list. That's not really a knock, it has a decent chance of making my list for this year, and maybe for this decade. There are just so many Great Matches, and a lot of matches I love will fall short.

If this match ended around 24 minutes in this would be a serious contender for my list. It's frustrating because they managed to put together a match with all the best aspects of modern NJPW plus a bit extra so it stands out.

Firstly, Jericho looks great here. I really have to admit this because this was just at the time that I was getting really sick of him because I felt he spent much of 2014-17 constantly trying to keep up with younger wrestlers having athletic workrate matches like he's still in his 20s and embarassing himself. I thought the matches with AJ Styles were cringing to watch at times how blatantly AJ was having to move at like 60% speed just so Jericho could keep up with doing spots that were clearly outside his athletic range. But finally, Jericho has accepted reality and has changed his style very similar to how La Park wrestles nowadays. Now he's just a grumpy mean old bastard who looks like he doesn't even want to be here and is just gonna beat the hell out of his opponent out of sheer malice. He's so much fun and it's quite refreshing on the card to see something this different, while at the same time Omega gets to keep his high octane offense because it's so much more oriented around strikes and bombs rather than anything that requires his opponent to do anything particularly difficult to take.

But then we get the worst aspect of modern NJPW creep in, with the fact that every big match for some reason has to go 30+ minutes, or 35 in this case. This is especially true for Kenny Omega. So in this match especially, it feels like the last 10 minutes were a totally different match just stuck on the end. The brawling disappears and they go into taking turns to hit each other with their biggest moves for huge nearfalls, until eventually someone Kenny hits his finisher to win. There's something a bit anticlimatic about how you just know that no matter what new brutal bombs they pull out, a NJPW match will still always end with someone hitting their regular finisher and a pinfall. Zack Sabre Junior's the only real exception, seeing how he doesn't really have a regular finisher. This is a match which totally would have been better if they'd stayed clear of that formula and just kept it going like the opening 20 minutes.